a chuckle from John and Antonio:
We once knew a woman who got a job translating three porn flicks from Italian to Spanish. Why did they bother, you ask. Because they were done in (well, mostly out of) Renaissance dress and the dialogue was in hexameters.
Three such flicks?
Cintra Wilson raises the alarm:
I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as diamond drill-bits. . . . Tom Cruise is becoming the Scary Flaming Eye from “The Lord of the Rings,” and I fear that nobody can stop him.
See what Scientology can do for you?
Popshot, a new punk rock magazine, scolds naïve anti-capitalists
for getting the wrong end of the stick.
(Found in Aaron Krowne’s blog of which I was not previously aware; he was on my list of sites to look at because of mathematical material.)
Mammoth trees near Martian south pole? Well, they’re curious, whatever they are. Could be accretions of something sticky, as in the ‘Coral’ screensaver.
Reminds me of a book I have, Where will we go when the Sun dies?, which I keep only because it contains a list of objects on the Moon which ought to have a closer look because they could be artifacts, e.g. what appears to be a bridge over a canyon.
Later: Never mind that the site owner is a true believer in the Cydonia Face . . . .
New Scientist: Neural network ‘in-jokes’ could pass secrets
This reminds me of a discussion, years ago on Extropians, of “Schelling points”: for under-constrained problems there may be a cultural preference for particular solutions. For example, if I ask you to meet me in Paris on a given day (but have no time to say more), and you’ve never been there before, you’ll go to the Eiffel Tower — but if we have previously met in Paris, you’ll go to wherever we met before. At least, that’s how I’ll bet.
These are examples of Schelling points, as I (mis)understand the notion.
But.
I know two people who have various things in common.
Suppose I tell each to meet the other in Chicago on a given day.
If they know nothing about each other, they’ll go to some generic Chicago landmark.
If I tell each that the other studied physics at UChi, they’ll go to the site of Fermi’s reactor, I guess.
But if I tell Bruce only that David is a science fiction fan, and tell David only that Bruce teaches physics, they’ll probably go to two different places.
I’m not sure what this thought-experiment tells us, if anything. 😉